Celeste, the woman I saw this morning had short hair like yours and caused me to alter my route. She reached into my mind and told me I existed. There is a way the eyes can do that when they look at you the way she did. How different from the grieving night and the tortured replay of foolish words. Can I tell you about the day I had, how eating the greasy spinach pie made me sad, as if once again I was a young punk listening to relentless Jack Jones on the jukebox while Gus at the cash register drew smoke up his nose? Even on a bright day, the air had a dirty feel to it, the city a corpse no one could revive. Always of course it is about us when I go back to that time, the sublet I was forced to take and the years of praying it would be you who had caused the message light to blink and how the sight of the red Subaru you drove could send me down, down and the area we had lived in was not a place for me to go if personal well-being was even slightly on my mind.
2003